Wild weather gives Earth the jitters

WEATHER can upset your mood, and now it appears it can even upset the balance of the Earth. Large high-pressure systems over a continent or depressions swirling across an ocean can jolt the Earth enough to alter the tilt of its axis.

Sebastien Lambert, from the Royal Observatory of Belgium in Brussels, and his colleagues used Global Positioning System data to track very small deviations in the Earth's tilt at a time when two other seasonal wobbles cancelled each other out.

By studying the motion of the Earth's poles the researchers were able to see them tracing small loops, no bigger than a piece of A4 paper. These centimetre-scale deviations coincided with variations in pressure at the Earth's surface, caused by the development of high or low-pressure weather systems. "The first very small loop that we saw was due to the simultaneous action of a low pressure on northern Europe, ...

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